The Jervaise Comedy | Page 5

just now," she said. "She--she
must be somewhere about."
Ronnie, still the cynosure of the swarm, turned himself about and
stared at Frank Jervaise. But it was Gordon Hughes who demonstrated
his power of quick inference and response, although in doing it he
overstepped the bounds of decency by giving a voice to our suspicions.
"Is the car in the garage? Your own car?" he asked.
"Yes. Rather. Of course," Jervaise replied uneasily.
"You've just looked?" Hughes insisted.
"I know the car's there," was Jervaise's huffy evasion, and he took
Ronnie by the arm and led him off into the drawing-room.
The Hall door stood wide open, and the tragedy of the night flowed
unimpeded through the house.
Although the horror had not been named we all recognised its finality.
We began to break up our formation immediately, gabbling tactful
irrelevancies about the delightful evening, the delinquent Carter, and
the foolishness of Sabbatarianism. Mrs. Atkinson appeared in the Hall,
cloaked and muffled, and beckoned to her three replicas. She
announced that their omnibus was "just coming round."
In the general downward drift of dispersion I saw Grace Tattersall
looking up at me with an expression that suggested a desire for the
confidential discussion of scandal, and I hastily whispered to Hughes
that we might go to the extemporised buffet in the supper-room and get
a whisky and seltzer or something. He agreed with an alacrity that I
welcomed at the time, but regret, now, because our retirement into
duologue took us out of the important movement, and I missed one or
two essentials of the development.
The truth is that we were all overcome at the moment by an irresistible
desire to appear tactful. We wanted to show the Jervaises that we had
not suspected anything, or that if we had, we didn't mind in the least,
and it certainly wasn't their fault. Nevertheless, I saw no reason why in
the privacy of the supper-room--we had the place to ourselves--I should
not talk to Hughes. I had never before that afternoon met any of the
Jervaise family except Frank, and on one or two occasions his younger

brother who was in the army and, now, in India; and I thought that this
was an appropriate occasion to improve my knowledge. I understood
that Hughes was an old friend of the family.
He may have been, although the fact did not appear in his conversation;
for I discovered almost immediately that he was, either by nature or by
reason of his legal training, cursed with a procrastinating gift of
diplomacy.
"Awkward affair!" I began as soon as we had got our whiskies and
lighted cigarettes.
Hughes drank with a careful slowness, put his glass down with
superfluous accuracy, and then after another instant of tremendous
deliberation, said, "What is?"
"Well, this," I returned gravely.
"Meaning?" he asked judicially.
"Of course it may be too soon to draw an inference," I said.
"Especially with no facts to draw them from," he added.
"All the same," I went on boldly, "it looks horribly suspicious."
"What does?"
I began to lose patience with him. "I'm not suggesting that the Sturtons'
man from the Royal Oak has been murdered," I said.
He weighed that remark as if it might cover a snare, before he scored a
triumph of allusiveness by replying, "Fellow called Carter. He's got a
blue nose."
Despite my exasperation I tried once more on a note of forced geniality,
"What sort of man is this chauffeur of the Jervaises? Do you know him
at all?"
"Wears brown leather gaiters," Hughes answered after another solemn
deliberation.
I could have kicked him with all the pleasure in life. His awful
guardedness made me feel as if I were an inquisitive little journalist
trying to ferret out some unsavoury scandal. And he had been the first
person to point the general suspicion a few minutes earlier, by his
inquiry about the motor. I decided to turn the tables on him, if I could
manage it.
"I asked because you seemed to suggest just now that he had gone off
with the Jervaises' motor," I remarked.
Hughes stroked his long thin nose with his thumb and forefinger. It

seemed to take him about a minute from bridge to nostril. Then he
inhaled a long draught of smoke from his cigarette, closed one eye as if
it hurt him, and threw back his head to blow out the smoke again with a
slow gasp of relief.
"One never knows," was all the explanation he vouchsafed after this
tedious performance.
"Whether a chauffeur will steal his master's motor?" I asked.
"Incidentally," he said.
"But, good heavens, if he's that sort of man..." I suggested.
"I'm not saying that he is," Hughes replied.
I realised then that his idea of our